SOUTH ASIA SESSION 69

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In Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor articulates a vision of what is truly new about modern cosmologies of sociopolitical order. Though he focuses on their production in Europe and America, he briefly nods toward Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe and suggests that other modern social imaginaries are possible.

These linked panels, South Asian Social Imaginaries, Parts I and II, frame a broad conversation between South Asianist scholars querying the coherencies, incoherencies, and singularities of emerging social imaginations in contemporary South Asia. Participants with research expertise in India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan examine what is singular to (and discontinuous within) regional structures and histories of how people understand themselves on the macro-scale. Their papers consider how regional expertise alternately clarifies or complicates the theoretical objects of modern social imaginaries such as the public sphere, civil society, religion, the people, the nation, democracy, and the notion of the region itself.

The papers in Panel I take up the challenge of thinking about what other modern social imaginaries emerge out of South Asia, whereas the papers in Panel II consider how elements of globalized forms of modern social imaginaries are clarified and complicated. The two panels are structured to facilitate a larger intellectual exchange between paper givers and attendant-participants by encouraging sustained discussion within and between the two panels.

Islamism and Secularism: Modernity’s Squabbling Offspring
Humeira Iqtidar, University of Cambridge
In this paper, I propose to use Islamism as a means to investigate secularism, and peripherally religion, as analytical categories with particular reference to the South Asian context. The concept of secularism occupies a central place in liberal political thought and is cognate with the concepts of democracy and freedom. In light of the significant normative value that is attached to the notion, it is curious that secularism has been very loosely conceptualized. It is broadly conceived of as a separation of state/public sphere and religion. However, the very looseness of the concept allowed it great elasticity; the form that this separation may take has seen huge variations, both within Europe and outside it. Notwithstanding the variations, fundamental to secularism has been an attempt not just to evict religion from the public sphere but to constantly remodel and reshape it. Islamist political forces are perceived to have raised a dramatic challenge to secularism in the recent past. Building on my ethnographic research with two Islamist parties, Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’awa, I suggest that Islamism is an innovation that has resulted from a particular kind of colonial secularism. The relationship between Islamism and secularism is an ongoing dialectical one and the changes in Islamism, in the Pakistani context specifically, are due to the parallel developments in each.

Locating Kerala: Region, Nation, Globe
Ritty Lukose, University of Pennsylvania
This presentation will explore the circulations of “Kerala”, a state on the southwestern tip of India, at the complex intersection between region, nation, and globe. Drawing on ethnographic work on globalization in the region, I will reflect on the spatial imaginaries through which we understand globalization, either through “local-global” frameworks or ones that nest regions within nations and within the globe. Diversity of language and region within India make these imaginaries salient for any ethnographic study in India. Further, the relationship between the micro and the macro is a perennial set of questions within ethnographic research, one that raises questions about contextualization and generalizability. However, Kerala raises some particular questions about these issues given the notion of exceptionalism that characterizes both scholarly and popular discourse.
Constructions of the Kerala “model” in international development, anthropological knowledge about its matrilineal past, and political narratives about its Marxist tradition construct Kerala as exemplary. Of particular interest is the ways this discourse of exceptionalism is gendered, one that paints Kerala’s women as liberated. The paper will suggest that these discourses have come under crisis in the 1990s, a crisis tied to globalization and the restructuring of politics in the region. In conclusion, I will suggest a more flexible and fluid understanding of region, nation, and globe – one that moves away from a spatial understanding of these entities as nested and scaled upward. I will suggest that such a move enables a richer and more complex understanding of the postcolonial politics of globalization in Kerala.

The Language of Pan-Islamism
Faisal Devji, New School for Social Research
South Asia has for many decades now formed an important part of Pan-Islamism as a global social imaginary, yet its role in this new formation has been little explored. At most there exist studies of how Muslim minority or majority populations in South Asia find in Pan-Islamism an imaginary that allows them some kind of vicarious access to the richer or religiously purer heartlands of Islam. Contrary to these studies, I am interested in how South Asia actually produces Pan-Islamism and in doing so locates itself at the center of the Muslim world. In this paper, I look at the most important such production of Pan-Islamism in South Asia, and indeed the world, which is to say the Khilafat Movement of the period following the First World War. This movement, which brought together Muslims and Hindus in the largest mass mobilization in South Asian history, was led by a Hindu, Gandhi, who thus became the most influential thinker of Pan-Islamism in modern times. My intent in this paper is to show that Pan-Islamism is not in fact a phenomenon internal to the Muslim community or Islam but one that opens South Asia to a pluralistic new social imaginary whose effects continue to be felt in the region to this day.